A tiny yet tremendous dream come true

Have you ever stood in a long line at an international airport, slowly inching toward the immigration inspector's counter, and looked over wistfully at the "Diplomatic Channel" lane? I remember so many jet-lagged afternoons at HKIA or JFK, staring incomprehensibly at the people around me and feeling like a zombie. If only I could breeze right through that empty lane and get on with the journey....

Oh friends, a most momentous thing has happened: I am now the owner of a diplomatic passport.

It has been 9 years and 6 months since getting a new passport. It's also been 9 years and 6 months with a horrid photo, so I tried to convey the weightiness of the situation to the girl at CVS who took a passport photo for me ("Can you just take one more please? Try one more time? This is for the next 10 years.")

Horrid photo aside, the old passport has well-beloved outlines of the last decade: The very first entry stamp into Hong Kong on 3 July 2003. 6 Chinese visas. Pages and pages of Lao entry and exit stamps from border crossings. The most prized of all - a single-entry tourist visa from the Union of Myanmar in 2009, before Burma got trendy.

The new passport is of an upgraded kind, though, and it has something lovely - quotes from American authors and leaders on each page. In light of the turmoil and attacks on our embassies last week, these two were particularly meaningful:

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." 

~John F. Kennedy

"We have a great dream. It started way back in 1776, and God grant that America will be true to her dream."

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

May God grant that we each live up to the noble callings we have received.